Percy MacMahon

Percy Alexander MacMahon (born 26 September 1854, Sliema, British Malta – 25 December 1929, Bognor Regis, England) was a mathematician, especially noted in connection with the partitions of numbers and enumerative combinatorics.

Percy MacMahon was born in Malta to a British military family. His father was a colonel at the time, retired in the rank of the brigadier. MacMahon attended the Proprietary School in Cheltenham. At the age of 14 he won a Junior Scholarship to Cheltenham College, which he attended as a day boy from 10 February 1868 until December 1870. At the age of 16 MacMahon was admitted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich and passed out after two years.

On 12 March 1873, MacMahon was posted to Madras, India, with the 1st Battery 5th Brigade, with the temporary rank of Lieutenant. The Army List showed that in October 1873 he was posted to the 8th Brigade in Lucknow. MacMahon’s final posting was to the No. 1 Mountain Battery with the Punjab Frontier Force at Kohat on the North West Frontier. He was appointed Second Subaltern on 26 January and joined the Battery on 25 February 1877. In the Historical Record of the No. 1 (Kohat) Mountain Battery, Punjab Frontier Force it is recorded that he was sent on sick leave to Muree (or Maree), a town north of Kohat on the banks of the Indus river, on 9 August 1877. On 22 December 1877 he started 18 months leave on a medical certificate granted under GGO number 1144. The nature of his illness is unknown. Officers did not receive discharge papers in the same way as ordinary soldiers, whose documents contain a wealth of interesting information.

This period of sick leave was one of the most significant occurrences in MacMahon’s life. Had he remained in India he would undoubtedly have been caught up in Roberts’s War against the Afghans, a bloody adventure which lasted two years and achieved nothing, either in a military or a political sense. In early 1878 MacMahon returned to England and the sequence of events began which led to him becoming a mathematician rather than a soldier. The Army List records a transfer to the 3rd Brigade in Newbridge at the beginning of 1878, and then shows MacMahon as ‘supernumerary’ from May 1878 until March 1879.

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